The Creationist Conspiracy
Steven Novella, who writes a skeptic’s blog, has discovered a sinister conspiracy. The Creations have joined forces and organized and they are infiltrating our universities and scientific publications. Scary!
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/id-making-an-end-run-around-science/#more-4253
“… they want to change society and the nature of science itself. They want to inject supernaturalism into the process of science, so that it can be made to support their world-view and religious beliefs. They cannot do this honestly, so they do it deceptively. They are also well-funded and tireless.”
Oh my godless! The Creationists are coming and we must find a way to stop them!
Ambiance 
mockturtle said,
March 10, 2012 at 8:54 pm
Oh my godless! The Creationists are coming and we must find a way to stop them!
LOL! :-D
lh said,
March 11, 2012 at 3:04 am
of interest
wj said,
March 11, 2012 at 6:25 pm
I’d join the mockery, except for one thing. I remember the same process by which the Republican Party was changed from being the Party of Lincoln into something else. Something that not a single Republican President of the 20th century could fit into.
I don’t have much time for conspiracy theories — and I have a couple of friends who are big on them. But lack of an actual conspiracy doesn’t mean that a process is not happening.
realpc920 said,
March 11, 2012 at 6:49 pm
Just imagine the horrible consequences if those Creationists succeed in infiltrating our respected scientific institutions and publications. People might start thinking there is nothing illogical or crazy about believing in things we can’t see or measure! And then what? They might even allow prayer back in the public schools or, even worse, Christmas Carols!!
And what would happen if we let them start indoctrinating children. The next generation might be brainwashed into thinking life didn’t originate and evolve simply because of blind chance. What will happen to our society if educated people start believing the universe is alive and conscious?
mockturtle said,
March 11, 2012 at 8:49 pm
God forbid! ;-)
"Salvation Rose" aka 'Chris Diamant' said,
March 12, 2012 at 4:17 pm
I find the fact that some people actually think there is a God, and some even believe in angels to have a scientific basis: I met one. I doubt those who ascribe to a mechanical and accidental universe will read much further.
The actual circumstances of this meeting and the fact that I was instructed by this angel for 21 years in New Hope PA gave me an insight into the invisible dimension we all share with these creatures which makes this seeming problem with certain people who want to believe that God made the heavens and the earth in what they think were seven 24 hour days a laughable exercise in a stubborn and dogmatic ignorance of how God really operates a farce of the first water.
I discovered that the 7 Days of Creation consisted in 7 Eons which represented millions of years of very careful tinkering and adjustment in a wide range of areas, of which being told about I am sure most rigid and fundamentalist christians, jews, and muslims would no doubt have me burned at the stake for aveering; if they could find me and a stake at the same place, and at the same time… with no witnesses..all in the name of God; of course
Don’t worry; in about 10 months this will all be quite academic; December 25th 2012 is going to be a Christimas Day no one will ever forget; that I promise you…
realpc920 said,
March 12, 2012 at 7:22 pm
Well Salvation Rose it’s very possible you really did have an angel friend. I have no idea. Our personal experiences are convincing only to ourselves. A scientific person could say that maybe you dreamed or hallucinated the angel.
And even if it was a genuine angel, that doesn’t necessarily mean everything it told you was “true.”
People who believe anything and everything that occurs to them just reinforce the materialists’ belief that all believers are delusional.
You could be right, I have no idea. But you give us no good reasons to believe you.
mockturtle said,
March 12, 2012 at 9:56 pm
As most of you know, I am a believer in Yahweh and I am a very scientific person in addition to being a Christian, not by birth but by research and Divine intervention. The notion that the universe and life, itself, came about by accident is, to me, laughable. But for those of you who believe it, I shall politely refrain from laughing. ;-)
realpc920 said,
March 13, 2012 at 7:50 am
I agree with you mockturtle. But I can also see why people like Novella are getting so paranoid and hysterical — when you look at the post by Salvation Rose, for example.
mockturtle said,
March 13, 2012 at 10:16 am
Science is merely man’s effort to understand God’s creation and its workings and to apply the discoveries to practical use. IMHO, science will, in time, discover more and more evidence for Intelligent Design. Much as I love and revere science, I do not rely on it to prove or disprove the existence of God.
realpc920 said,
March 13, 2012 at 6:55 pm
Our science could only tell us something about God if we were smarter than God. And if we were smarter than God, we would be God. And we are not.
But I think science can tell us a lot about what is NOT true. Science can, eventually, tell us that blind chance cannot create anything except disorder.
And anyway, there is no such thing as blind chance. On higher levels everything is connected, and there are meanings we do not see from our level.
People like Novella worship human science and they need to believe there is nothing higher, nothing beyond the grasp of our conscious intelligence.
It must give them a sense of power and control. It makes them feel sane.
Norma said,
April 3, 2012 at 7:09 pm
Is this a joke? Librarians are 223:1 liberal to conservative, and guess who’s buying the books? There aren’t enough creationists in any school, college or university to even put anything on the bulletin boards about a meeting.
William O. B'Livion. said,
April 5, 2012 at 8:06 am
I haven’t been around here in a while. I think the last time I visited was around the time I relocated from Baghdad to the Central US.
It’s nice to see you’re still up and about Ambia. I was up your way (Durham, NC) in October of 2010 drinking and shooting with a buddy of mine. Though not at the same time.
Dunno even how i got here today.
But oddly enough, I’ve been reading this http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-Thomas-Kuhn/dp/0226458083/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333624335&sr=8-1 little by little (I have a lot going on, and keeping focus on stuff that doesn’t pay is harder than reading distracting stuff that relaxes).
And damn right we ought to keep Creationists out of science.
I have no problems with religious folks or religions. I don’t sneer at people who have a strong faith in God, and I have nothing but respect for those who live by their beliefs.
(here it comes)
BUT Science is a LOT more than “form a theory and try to prove it”. In fact “Form a theory and try to prove it” is the *antithesis* of science.
I don’t know if the Big Bang was in the manner of what Dickhead Dawkins believes, or was God saying “Let their be Light”. But I know that if I want to form firm predictions about the next decade or hte next billion years, saying “God did It Because He Wanted To” gives me very little to work with.
To cross posts, if I want to understand the effect of statins on cholesterol levels and how those effect CHD and mortality rates, praying in church ain’t gonna get it. Last I check the Bible didn’t do much more than basic (begat) biology.
Science is interrogating the world. It is holding *everything* up to rigor and methodology. It is developing a consistent set of rules that BOTH explain the past and predict the future.
Creationism doesn’t do that. Creationism gets you fuzzy thinking. It gets you folks who call Reiki and “accupressure” medicine.
God did not create all animal life in two days sometime around 4004 B.C.
Charlatans and con men have always wrapped their patter up in the language of science and/or medicine. This is no difference.
ID and Creationism are as different from Science as Einstürzende Neubauten differs from Thomas Wolfe.
Creationists and Atheists like Dick Dawkins deserve each other.
amba12 said,
April 5, 2012 at 9:06 am
Hello, William! It’s really good to hear from you. Glad you are back safe.
What is Einstürzende Neubauten? That means something like “collapsing new buildings” in German. I could Google it, but that’s so . . . autistic. More fun to be told.
A few years ago I wrote an essay on Pajamas Media taking Intelligent Design theorists to talk for selectively seeking evidence that proves a prior held theory (“there is a God”). That is apologetics, not science. Science properly seeks to disprove a theory.
I think realpc’s point is that when it comes to the hypothesis that all real causation in nature other than that by human agents is material and essentially unconscious, some scientists also come dangerously close to assuming the unproven. The reason is that material causation is easier to detect and measure than, say, information fields such as hypothesized by Rupert Sheldrake, who was literally called a “heretic” by Nature (and who has a major new book coming out this fall). Or, “When you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
I read a lot of science for my current work, which is science copyediting. What is now being discovered would not be incompatible with a theory that there is intelligence associated with structure on many levels, and that there is an element of deliberate, responsive innovation in evolution — trial as well as error. (One mainstream scientist mused recently that epigenetic changes in gene expression might influence genes to mutate in response to environmental conditions. Not so random. Epigenetic changes can be inherited, too, which has resurrected at least one leg of Lamarck.) What if there is a kind of mind associated with DNA? You don’t have to jump back to “God” to wonder about this stuff. Science is discovering things far stranger than either our religion or our science has yet conceived of, and complex beyond our ability to understand, and when scientists try to fit it all within a confidently materialistic framework, their assertions lately have an uneasy sound of whistling in the dark.
Note that I’m not trying to make a case for the existence of “God.” That concept was a human attempt to conceive of what was going on with very limited tools. I’m trying to say it is not scientific not to stay open to the possibility that nature itself knows what it is doing in some way. And that if science keeps going with an open mind, it might find by scientific means that that is the case. Or not. Time will tell. The more we know, the less we realize we know.
amba12 said,
April 5, 2012 at 9:09 am
And that could be Kuhn’s next paradigm shift. Or not.
realpc920 said,
April 5, 2012 at 7:36 pm
Using one word, “creationism,” to mean a range of different things is a good example of fuzzy thinking. If you call ID creationism, then you don’t know anything about ID, except what you may have heard from people like Dawkins.
ID is nothing but a criticism of the currently accepted theory of what causes evolution. The currently accepted theory is NOT scientific because there is no evidence for it.
People have been criticizing Darwin’s theory for a long time, and ID is only one of many opposing views.
The only reason the currently accepted theory has been accepted is that it is compatible with materialism and atheism. Not because it’s true, not because it’s plausible or scientific (it isn’t).
Darwin was right about natural selection. Since most people are good at fuzzy thinking, ideas that are sensible get mashed in with ideas that are nonsense. If part of Darwin’s theory was true, then all of his theory must be true.
If you try to remove some of the fuzz from your thinking William, maybe you will see what I mean.
realpc920 said,
April 5, 2012 at 7:40 pm
“Creationism gets you fuzzy thinking. It gets you folks who call Reiki and “accupressure” medicine.”
And by the way I suspect you know nothing whatsoever about Reiki or accupressure. Beyond what you have been told by people like Dawkins, or his devoted followers.
realpc920 said,
April 5, 2012 at 7:49 pm
“when it comes to the hypothesis that all real causation in nature other than that by human agents is material and essentially unconscious, some scientists also come dangerously close to assuming the unproven.”
They aren’t “dangerously close” Amba, they have already gone far over the edge. Not only is materialism not proven, there is no evidence for it, and it doesn’t even make sense.
“What if there is a kind of mind associated with DNA? ”
If there is a kind of mind associated with everything, then it would also be associated with DNA. But you are only thinking about the surface, what we see of DNA in a microscope. Why assume that’s all there is to it?
“Note that I’m not trying to make a case for the existence of “God.” That concept was a human attempt to conceive of what was going on with very limited tools. ”
I agree with you that the human concept of “God” is always very limited and human-centric. But as soon as you suggest that the universe might be conscious, and consciousness might be everything, you are making the case for what our little word “God” tries to point towards.
amba12 said,
April 6, 2012 at 12:13 am
Right; ID is not creationism, but if you read William Dembski’s writings intended for other IDers he is explicit about its being a more sophisticated way of fighting the same battle for the existence of the creator God. I was disappointed when I found out that much of ID is a quest for evidence of God’s existence, not because I don’t want science to come to that conclusion, if that’s how it turns out, but because you can’t start with the conclusion and work backwards. It’s a subtle but total difference. You can’t go in assuming that there is, or isn’t, a God and then look for proof of that, and call it science. It’s propaganda, or apologetics, either way.
Much of what Marilynne Robinson scathingly calls “parascientific” thinking (the “skeptics”) is driven by an obsession with proving that there is not a God, or any kind of intelligence (except us), in nature. The most hilarious example of this I’ve seen was in an article on string theory. The notion is that there can’t be anything special about this universe that makes life possible, so it must be just one of an infinite number of universes. This notion is unprovable — it has to be taken . . . are you ready? . . . ON FAITH! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
amba12 said,
April 6, 2012 at 12:13 am
Out of the frying pan and into the fire!
realpc920 said,
April 6, 2012 at 3:35 pm
“f you read William Dembski’s writings intended for other IDers he is explicit about its being a more sophisticated way of fighting the same battle for the existence of the creator God.”
This is just confusion over words. They are fighting against the philosophy of materialism. The only alternative to materialism is some kind of intelligent creation, which they happen to call God.
William O. B'Livion. said,
April 8, 2012 at 5:45 am
First off, I’ve spent very little time listening to Dawkins. He’s an ass. I am not a modern, militant anti-christian atheist. I’m a old skool skeptic turned apatheist. Your gods no longer interest me, they have nothing to offer that I desire and can answer no questions I have.
“They are fighting against the philosophy of materialism. The only alternative to materialism is some kind of intelligent creation, which they happen to call God.”
THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT CREATIONISM IS. Maybe, if one were drawing a Venn diagram of that sort of thing ID would be a smallish bubble that mostly is inside of Creationism with a tiny sliver outside, but it still comes down to the idea that some sort of God Like Being set out to create something like Man.
Or maybe you’re so wrapped up in the whole thing that you’re like some headbanger that can tell the difference between Norwegian black metal and finnish death metal. Or is it the other way around? Either way, to those of us with real work to get done it’s all nerds with big amps and dyed hair. Kinda like Goths, but louder and smellier.
When your answer to uncomfortable or hard questions is “Well, at this point we invoke an intelligent creator had piss off to the pub for a dram” then you’re not doing science, you’re doing religion.
And if you think things like Reiki, accupressure (and accupuncture[1]) and the like are in *any way* medicine or scientific then we simply cannot have a conversation about this since we’re not in the same world.
The assumption, from the scientific perspective, is that there is a rational, knowable universe, and that it is possible to understand *everything* (maybe not all at once) all the way down.
There may be some sort of intelligence behind the universe. Or it may be the weak anthropic principle at work. To a scientist it doesn’t matter because even if God Did It, he did it because of some underlying principle or reason (map Euthyphro to the science realm) so the hand waving that that ID/Creationists do is just nonsense.
Einstürzende Neubauten is a german industrial band. They were one of the original industrial noise bands of the early 80s before the sampleit-loopit-sellit disco bands like Front 242 and KMFDM. The name should be translated to “Collapsing New Buildings”
They are as unlike Thomas Wolfe as a very unlike thing.
This is Neubauten:
They have a wide range:
[1] Accupuncture, to it’s credit, generally does not claim to be scientific, because it isn’t. Reiki also doesn’t claim to be scientific, because it isn’t. However fools and charlatans will often make claims for these sorts of practices that are at best provably incorrect, and at worst dangerously wrong. The same used to be true of Chiropractic care, but now they’ve been hammered on enough by the legal system that they have narrowed their claims to only slightly more than they can deliver. Reiki and Acupuncture are the Asian equivalent of Humor and Bleeding. Well, no one who should be out alone. But somehow when we muck it up with Eastern “Mysticism” we get all stoopid.
realpc920 said,
April 8, 2012 at 1:06 pm
Maybe you don’t like Dawkins, William, but your beliefs are the same. He is a materialist who does not think intelligence is a general property of the universe. He thinks intelligence is something that is somehow generated by the collection of cells we call the brain.
An alternative to materialism is the idea that the universe is made out of information. There are no little material things that make up the universe. Our impression that our world is solid and tangible results from the way our 5 senses interact with the information that makes up the world we inhabit.
If you define “creationism” as the idea that the universe is an infinitely complex system made out of information, then ID is a form of creationism. But people also define creationism in terms of the Judeo-Christian creation myth. There is nothing in ID that says anything about that particular myth.
Acupuncture, Reiki and chiropractic are all denied by mainstream medicine. Mainstream medicine denies the existence of “life energy.” They have no scientific reasons for denying the existence of life energy, it’s just the traditional mainstream view.
Rupert Sheldrake is one of many alternative scientists who do not deny the possible existence of life energy.
Alternative science, in general, is open to some plausible possibilities which are denied by mainstream science.
Mainstream science is really an establishment or collection of institutions which calls itself scientific. But very often it is as unscientific as any cult or religion. It has aligned itself with materialist philosophy, which is based on faith, not reason or evidence.
No one has any ultimate answers, but alternative science, in general, is more open to discovery and more in line with theory and evidence.
As Amba mentioned, materialists have come up with some bizarre ideas in desperate attempts to support their faith in a non-intelligence universe.